According to a recent article in the New York Times,<\/em> a few weeks before announcing his re-election campaign, President Obama invited two dozen Wall Street executives and long time donors to the Blue room of the White House<\/a> to discuss ways to spur economic recovery. He also solicited their thoughts on bank and hedge fund regulation, and the deficit.<\/p>\n The event, organized by the Democratic National Committee, kicked off an aggressive push by Mr. Obama to win back the allegiance of one of his most vital sources of campaign cash\u2014in part by trying to convince Wall Street that his policies, far from undercutting the investor class, have helped bring banks and financial markets back to health.<\/p>\n Last month, Mr. Obama\u2019s campaign manager, Jim Messina, traveled to New York for back-to-back meetings with Wall Street donors, ending at the home of Marc Lasry, a prominent hedge fund manager, to court donors close to Mr. Obama\u2019s onetime rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton. And Mr. Obama will return to New York this month to dine with bankers, hedge fund executives and private equity<\/a> investors at the Upper East Side restaurant Daniel.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n President Obama, and his Republican opponent, each plan to raise $1 billion to win in 2012, and competition for corporate and Wall Street campaign donations will be fierce. Citizens United opened the floodgates for unlimited corporate donations, and candidates of both parties will be vying to raise large amounts of money from the top 1% of the country. The top 1% expect their agendas will be reflected in the policies of the politicians they support. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the likely Republican presidential candidate, is busy using his background in venture capital and his Wall Street friendly policy proposals to woo financial-industry donors away from President Obama.<\/p>\n Working families take a back seat to the needs of Wall Street<\/strong><\/p>\n The result of this intense focus on big money is that the majority of Americans are left without adequate representation. Many wealthy donors want tax breaks and tax subsidies, toothless regulation, and the privatization-for-profit of government functions such as education, criminal justice, and the military\u2014none of which serves the interests of working families. Medicare and Social Security cuts are on both Democratic and Republican agendas because the top 1% would rather find ways to make money off of them than fund them through higher taxes.<\/p>\n But there is a moral price to pay when money dominates politics. Ex-presidential candidate Gary Hart<\/a> recently wrote about the social and economic damage caused by politicians turning a blind eye to the growing gap between very wealthy and the rest of us.<\/a><\/p>\n . . . we have a growing number of homeless children. Over 90% of the students in a California grade school were homeless according to a recent news story<\/a>. One in five<\/a> Americans do not have any health care. About ten percent of employable people cannot find work. [The combined number of unemployed and underemployed is closer to 16 percent.] Many elderly people have lost their homes. . . . hunger relief organization Share Our Strength regularly documents the huge number of children who don’t begin to have adequate diets. Afghan and Iraq veterans are living in public shelters or on the streets. The evidence is overwhelming of a great gap between what our society ought to be and what it actually is on the moral scale.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The moral choice for Congress and the President is to embrace government intervention in the economy in the form of a jobs bill and foreclosure relief. It is to meaningfully regulate business and financial markets, and to reform the tax code to make the outsourcing of jobs unprofitable. Yet Congress and the Obama administration are, at least at the moment, determined to let Wall Street and the private sector determine the economic fate of the country.\u00a0Although this sounds like a free market, neoliberal ideological position, there is a very practical reason why they are letting the corporate elite determine the economy, and it has to do with the upcoming election. A large government expenditure, for example in the form of a jobs bill, could be slightly inflationary, which would reduce the value of bonds held by that top 1%\u2014the very 1% who are being wooed for their campaign donations. So, unless the economy really goes off a cliff, meaningful government intervention is a non-starter.<\/p>\n President Obama wants the private sector to lead us out of the recession<\/strong><\/p>\n Yet, \u00a0relying on the private sector to create jobs is a highly dubious strategy. Corporations, who are accountable to their shareholders, have no loyalty to working families, or to the public good, or even to the United States. They have been sitting on record levels of cash, investing in equipment, and hiring abroad where labor is cheap. The private sector did<\/em> create jobs in the last months, but they are generally low paying and not adequate in numbers to address the levels of unemployment we are experiencing. In other words, the so-called \u201cfree market\u201d which is not \u201cfree,\u201d but rather highly subsidized by the tax dollars of working people, is not a viable solution for the systemic economic and social problems that plague this country. If anything the celebrated \u201cfree market\u201d is getting more parasitic as time goes on.<\/p>\n A better solution is for the government to both jumpstart and direct the economy by creating jobs that offer a living wage in alternative energy, transportation, infrastructure and education. \u00a0Even\u00a0former Obama economic advisor Larry Summers, who has been a staunch friend of Wall Street, is calling for a new stimulus.<\/a><\/p>\n “A sick economy constrained by demand works very differently from a normal one,” he writes in a recent article in the Financial Times,<\/a> <\/em>before calling for a fresh stimulus while pointedly rejecting deficit-cutting as the fix. “The fiscal debate must accept that the greatest threat to our creditworthiness is a sustained period of slow growth.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n However, 0n Saturday, June 11, 2011, President Obama made it perfectly clear that he has no plans to initiate a \u201cfresh stimulus.\u201d From Bloomberg Businessweek:<\/a><\/p>\n